notes on somas.is

Understanding beets, the music organizer

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago now (in 2021), I wrote about how I managed my music library. I still use beets years later, except now, I use it quite happily. This is different from years ago, because, if read that old post, there’s quite a lot of kvetching near the end in which I do the usual dance of suggesting that beets does too much, and that I wish I could just write my own music organizer.

Organizing your Nix configuration without flakes

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Once, I used Flakes. Then, I realized how much they actually complicate things. Which is to say, this week I decided to rip out all the Flakes stuff from my dotfiles. This is a big event, I suppose, because Flakes were the first thing I had an opinion about when I started using NixOS in 2022, and I figured they were the way of the future and that they’d not be experimental eventually and that I might as well learn that now while I’m getting started. It is now 2025, and I am unemployed and trying to find some way into tech pretty unsuccessfully so far, having blown off grad school; as you can imagine, I have lots of free time.

transgender ghosts

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I studied an exerpt from Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in class, and recalled something from a past transgender history class. This is adapted from a writing for that class that I feel particularly good about.

I will draw some comparisons that may appear crude on the surface, because the comparison between someone’s transition and their death has always been a violent one, but that’s the point I’m getting at.

music library maintenance

Fri, 21 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was talking with a friend a few days ago because they posted about how much space storing music takes up, when I decided that I ought to write down how I do my music library’s organization.

Now, ideally this might not be that interesting, but I don’t have much storage space, and I don’t wish to store lossless music on everything. I just don’t have the storage space across all my devices.

therapy sessions in assigned reading responses

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I seem to keep allowing my gender studies professors to become part-time therapists. probably not a great thing; however, in my defense, reflection is therapy and they’re asking for reflection. sometimes I feel a little proud of what I wrote, perhaps because the things I read helped me to work through some of the things troubling me. so, I figure it could be worth sharing.

androgyny as a solution

So what does androgyny have to do with transgenderism? Any person, mainstream and not particularly gender-conflicted, can opt for androgyny. Yet those of us who don’t fit that description, who may still yearn to cross over, if only to return to a balanced state, need to examine our options. Crossdressing may be a bold beginning (perhaps an end in itself), but nonetheless offers the potential for integration and wholeness. Transsexualism, while perfectly appropriate for some, may often be more of an overstated resolution-indeed, a form of escape. Trading one set of stereotypic gender restrictions for another is a denial of wholeness, unless one simply feels more centered in the gender of choice (given this culture), hence more able to strive for wholeness in that form. However, other transsexual people who may never realistically "pass" in society might find greater solace through androgyny.

music making tools

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I make music. I think that even makes me a musician™. So, I thought I’d make a post about the tools I use to make music. Occasionally I’m asked, and usually it means I have to go retracing the steps I took to get a hold of the things I use, so it might be worth it to write down these things for the future.

Just for the record: there’s obviously no sponsorship here, this is my genuine thoughts on the things I use. I’m not trying to shill for any company, and if I were, there’d be a disclaimer. That said… I’d always be down for free hardware and software in exchange for an honest review. But this isn’t that.

agape loneliness

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

it is the beginning of december, the worst month of the year

relationships take on an almost conciliatory role during quarantine, during late capital even. its almost as if facing the world alone, scary as it is, can be hard to bear, even with one partner.

there’s a certain perceived prevalence of polyamorous relationships among trans people, mostly trans femmes I believe, and I think this can in part explain it. for some there can be a strange disconnect to cisgender society, and even to a trans community, be it just a lack of relation to one another or what. this too can explain to some extent, the prevalence. however, this isn’t to say that polyamory would not exist in a post capitalist world (I in fact feel it’d be more common), but that it’s just one of the many aspects that can influence people to seek things the way they do.

memory fades but our words are forever

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Talking with Violet tonight I realized how scary things are sometimes. I’ve spent the greater portion of my life talking to people online. I’ve been on IRC since I was 10, younger than anyone really should be, and I’ve been using Discord for a few years now. IRC is a plain text protocol, you keep the logs and it isn’t really the responsibility of anyone else. Had I been better with keeping archives and placing value on things like that, I might have logs from long ago. There are friends who I only knew on IRC, and this being prior to the lack of anonymity we’ve accepted in our social networks, I actually don’t know any of their names. There’s a small selection of people who I’ve kept up in other ways, because as luck would have it I’d run into them again somewhere and know for sure it was them. What about those who I do not remember anymore, who no longer seem to coalesce where I did? The memory of them has become blurry and obscured as I’ve gotten older and realized how many years depression, social ostracization, and gender dysphoria took from me. I was cleaning out my Dropbox account a few months ago when I found three screenshots of my desktop from around 2011. They are the earliest pictures I have of things I did on the computer that I remember taking. In one screenshot, there was an XChat window with me and a friend talking in a channel we founded together, to work on fun stuff for the Nintendo DSi’s web browser. What happened to the screenshots, and why am I not posting them here? Because past me deleted them. I thought I should move on, and I didn’t have the IRC logs of the conversations I had with that person anymore. That was a (looking back now, ironic) choice I made for myself. I met Violet on Tumblr, I knew her there for years and years, and we started talking more after we both were on a Discord server dedicated to a favorite music artist. Had I not chosen to talk more to her, I would not have started hormone therapy and escaped the clutches of depression, I would not have traveled out of the country for the first time in my life, and I would be a much lonelier person. What does this have to do with anything else mentioned here? At the time I’m writing this, we have sent 330,097 direct messages back and forth since January 13th, 2017. The first things said were "Hi" (from her), and then "🐱 cat" (from me). She had a cat as her avatar at the time. (she told me this while reading this post, because I didn’t remember this anymore, and only her current avatar on Discord shows for all of her messages, which is no longer a cat) We talk just about every single day and if I had the message data myself I’d be interested in finding the days in which we did not talk. The me that sent that reply is an unrecognizably different person than who I am now; stays in her room, lives with her parents, has a tenuous relationship with anyone at school and anyone her age. I now live two and a half hours from my parents in the mountains of North Carolina with three other roommates, one of which is my other girlfriend, Cassie; did I mention I’m polyamorous now? I talk to my mom almost every day even if I have nothing to say, people at work seem to think I’m a normal human being. I have changed. I’m rambling again. When me and Violet are together, our chat goes quiet. If one were to look at our chat history they might think something had happened for a month of my life, to cause me to not really say much at all to her and vice versa. It scares me for a very irrational reason: a stunning amount of my life has changed purely through a single chat window I’ve had on my computer for multiple years. I have no logs of it; I am purely going on the grace of Discord, that they will not suddenly disappear one day and take all of our words with it. Is Discord profitable? It won’t stay profitable. No proprietary chat solution has ever stayed profitable. It too, will fall. When GDPR came into effect, Discord suddenly started allowing people to download their data in a huge, unmaintainable and irritating archive of data, that, if memory serves (it doesn’t!), only even contains your side of all conversations. This makes sense from a legal standpoint, but they are therefore the most useless conversation logs ever because of it. There are other archiving mechanisms: pullcord, and Discord History Tracker. These solutions work to actually create logs of your chats, rather than just giving you all your data and forgetting a conversation isn’t one-sided. Discord History Tracker actually is just a script on top of the Discord client itself that uses the client’s own mechanisms to download all the messages it can. It is a cumbersome and slow method, and it will take a very long time to download everything, but it is the safest and least easily bannable method of archiving your chats. It does not archive anything that is not a text message. Message attachments are only left in as URLs to their location on cdn.discordapp.com. pullcord downloads everything: custom emojis, all shared files/images, every server and channel and direct message your account can access, it will download. It also comes with a disclaimer on the readme that your account could get banned, because it’s using an unofficial Discord client to interface with a standard Discord user account, rather than a bot account. Discord’s ToS does not allow this. They instead include gems such as: > You agree not to (and not to attempt to) (i) use the Service for any > use or purpose other than as expressly permitted by these Terms; (ii) > copy, adapt, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, distribute, > license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, > stream, broadcast, attempt to discover any source code, reverse > engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise exploit the Service or > any portion of the Service, except as expressly permitted in these > Terms; or (iii) use data mining, robots, spiders, or similar data > gathering and extraction tools on the Service. No licenses or rights > are granted to you by implication or otherwise under any intellectual > property rights owned or controlled by the Company or its licensors, > except for the permissions and rights expressly granted in these > Terms. Emphasis mine. So when we are together, and our chat goes quiet, I feel a pit in stomach in an indescribable way sometimes. I’m with her, I’m happy, but the entire method and medium with which we talk has lost that relatively concrete property. The memories I have of our conversations in person will fade, and whenever I finally start to live with her, the writing of this post will be such a distant memory that I will likely not remember what exactly the conversation that prompted this was. The years I have forgotten have left a hole that I can not entirely account for in my own history, and I can only hope that as time goes on and I have other to fill in the gaps, it might gain more clarity as years go by; but it could just as easily continue to disappear, and I sure have let it do so. I can not index and search through the words I’ve said in the bed before falling asleep. Where am I going with this? It is the responsibility of any communication protocol to not do this shit. Be gentle with your users; be gentle with their conversations and value what they say. I could almost excuse Discord’s "no data gathering and extraction tools" rule, if they provided a local logging mechanism of some sort, but they do not. I am, additionally, learning that perhaps this is simply a thing I will need to learn to become easy with. Normally I am a very easy going person, willing to throw away the concrete and the permanent when it seems bothersome and constricting. Do I need to let go of this concreteness, and accept that all conversations are ephemeral by their very nature? Maybe I do, and perhaps I should also spend less time on the computer. With IRC, at least you knew what you were getting into. It is ephemeral in a way Snapchat can only dream to be, because it only serves to repeat what was sent to it to anyone who happens to be listening. So if you wanted to have history, you’d keep logs, and if you really valued it you’d keep them for as long as you could. If you didn’t have them, maybe you could ask someone else in the channel? Or perhaps your IRC bouncer has been keeping logs for years while you’ve been barely checking a channel. This is something that every chat service in existence today seems to throw to the wayside. Logs become the responsibility of the service provider, and the service provider isn’t very sentimental about the first time you told her you loved her, or the long nights you stayed up talking, or the fact that you called your chat’s pinned messages "the fridge" because you thought it was cute. The purpose is to provide that service of history, it is not to create ownership or identification with that history. Any chat service that provides archive downloading might only provide the messages you sent, which is a thing that makes legal sense, but not human sense. The thought of running pullcord on a cronjob and having a consistent and up-to-date copy of all the conversations I’ve had on Discord sounds so nice. I’m afraid though that the amount of data I would download would get me noticed and banned though, and being banned is scary. I’d have the archives, but they’re only facsimiles, they’re not the chat window where I had all these memories in. I’m not sure how to finish this but if anything, consider this a plea to all chat services to at the very least provide local logging, or at least allow me to use a utility like pullcord without issue. I have lost enough. I am confronted with the inevitability that my memories of the good times I have had will fade away in a more secret and quiet way than the bad memories have, and I want to at least put up a fight.

a reflection on the role of philosophy as therapy

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In my project to assert gender studies and philosophy and being one in the same, with the help of my professor, we discovered a line of thought coursing through this concept that I myself didn't really pick up on until it was put into words by her. What I was aiming at was to try and reconcile two different fields I had an interest in. In this reflection though, I want to explore that therapeutic current more. Through my own gender studies, I always felt like there was a deep connection into some of the same major questions of philosophy: what is the nature of our existence, what is identity, what do we do to live a good life, how do we make the world better. At the end, maybe I see gender studies as being just a subset of philosophy- the philosophy of gender, philosophy of sexuality, philosophy aiming to speak critically to the state of the world. That last conception is not a controversial statement, Marx's own goal was to change the world rather than merely interpret it. Philosophy for me has always been a therapeutic endeavor, personally. My first ethics class at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College was a pretty low-key affair, my teacher was, as far as I know, a retired Presbyterian preacher, and I was the only person that consistently stayed awake in the class (rare for, at the time, extremely depressed me). When he'd speak of the way that ethics compels us to doing good, and he'd speak of the forms and how, at the end of it all, we have a facsimile of what actually is as our only window into the world, it always spoke to a part of me I knew was there but couldn't express. My therapy was philosophy, and though I'm a very irreligious person, hearing people waxing philosophical gave me a comfort that got me through the dark times of my life. When you see people reaching for that which they can't fully express and a sort of universal truth, you are witnessing a light inside the person that wonders; everyday life doesn't give you access to that. Everyday life gives you transactions and exchanges, often not willing to give you the messy and unsure. This might all be getting too touchy-feely, but that's the point. Therapy is personal. I spent all my life until about age thirteen not being sure why I always felt out of place, misunderstood, and like I wasn't playing my part right. I still don't feel like I've got a grasp on the world yet, but I'm better now. And in the dark night that social ostracization and an unsureness of self causes, I ultimately still knew that there was a real me in there somewhere, that there was a identity I just haven't put together. Philosophy laid down the status of what a person without self-description is. Gender studies has helped to give words for that self-description. Without each other they nothing.

transness and philosophy are not exclusive concepts

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In class this afternoon, I began to realize these thoughts and wrote them down frantically into my notebook, because something was bothering me that I couldn’t quite grasp fully. We were discussing Stoicism, but in particular, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Discussing the use of nature in it, my professor started to speak of Aurelius’ ideas of nature. Our class was taking issue with nature and naturalism’s current through Stoicism, which really ended up being more a current through Greek and Roman philosophy anyway.